People listen to music for different reasons. Some people, -its background music— but other people need it to survive. Other people need music to get things out and maybe that’s just where I’m coming from, you know, when things weren’t easy f...
I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry. It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes with...
Standing Deer As the house of a person in age sometimes grows cluttered with what is too loved or too heavy to part with, the heart may grow cluttered. And still the house will be emptied, and still the heart. As the thoughts of a person in age somet...
Rob: I want more, I wanna see the others on the big top-five. I want to see Penny and Charlie and Sarah, all of them. You know? Just see 'em and talk to 'em. You know, like a Bruce Springsteen song. Bruce Springsteen: You call, you ask them how they ...
Colorado Ryan: How'd you come out with Burdette? John T. Chance: He wanted to talk to his brother. Colorado Ryan: What'd he have to say? John T. Chance: Nothing. Colorado Ryan: You mean he didn't say anything? John T. Chance: Why are you so intereste...
Jöns: It's hell with women and hell without women. No matter how you reason it seems like the logic thing to do is to kill them while it's still fun. Blacksmith Plog: Bickering and swill! Jöns: Screaming babies and diapers full of piss! Blacksmith ...
[HAL's shutdown] HAL: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a ...
There's a stranger in a car Driving down your street Acts like he knows who you are Slaps his hand on the empty seat and says "Are you gonna get in Or are you gonna stay out?" Just a stranger in a car Might be the one they told you about Well you nev...
About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page. "Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired. He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells...
The library smells like old books — a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I...
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies. Where is the party in opp...
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - t...
When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school, It was worth ruining my eyes To know I could still keep cool, And deal out the old right hook To dirty dogs twice my size. Later, with inch-thick specs, Evil was just my lark: Me and m...
Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a speci...
You win over people just like you win over a dog. You see a dog passing down the street with an old bone in his mouth. You don't grab the bone from him and tell him it's not good for him. He'll growl at you. It's the only thing he has. But you throw ...
He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look. This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We're seeing back in time. No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing rig...
The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously doe...
The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; an...
Liberating ourselves from the traditional strictures of marriage altogether, and/or transforming those strictures to include all of us -- gay, feminist, career-focused, baby crazy, monogamous, non-monogamous, skeptical, romantic, and everyone in betw...
They’ve been lying from the start. From the first time we read the words ‘once upon a time,’ we’re fed the idea that these girls—these gorgeous, demure, singing-with-the-wildlife girls—get a happy ending. And I get it. Poor thing had to d...
I have been seeing dragons again. Last night, hunched on a beaver dam, one held a body like a badly held cocktail; his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz, sent a morse of ripples to my canoe. They are not richly bright but muted like dawns or the vagu...
